A Surprising Rapprochement Between China and the U.S.

Ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Beijing, Chinese authorities sponsored a contest designed to inspire people to behave nicely on the city’s public-transit system. Prizes for the hundred winners of the competition, called “Be a Splendid Beijinger and Welcome APEC—Civilized, Polite Passengers,” included subway passes and certificates of honor, according to the Wall Street Journal. A Splendid Beijinger might, for example, submit an entry about having encouraged other passengers to stand in line, or helped others with their bags.

Officials might have extended the competition to the APEC participants themselves; their behavior was, at times, less than polite. Early on, there was an awkward handshake between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose countries are locked in a territorial dispute over a group of islands in the East China Sea. Then, at a dinner on Monday night, President Barack Obama stepped out of his car while chewing gum, inspiring one professor to complain, on a micro-blogging service, “We made this meeting so luxurious, with singing and dancing, but see Obama, stepping out of his car chewing gum like an idler.” By Tuesday, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s alleged involvement in the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which killed more than thirty Australians. These incidents receive attention, of course, because they reflect the tensions simmering among the countries attending APEC, but they raise questions about how much—if anything—the conference can really accomplish. Even in a good year, leaders often leave having done a couple of nice photo ops, and little else.

The relationship between the U.S. and China has recently been strained by differences over cybersecurity, human rights, antitrust issues, and China’s territorial dispute with Japan. Some had wondered, too, whether the Democrats’ losses in the U.S. midterm elections would make Chinese leaders even more reluctant to collaborate with Obama. By Tuesday, though, it had become clear that the U.S. and China, the conference’s most influential attendees, were putting aside some of their differences for the sake of fraternity.

The first big announcement came on Tuesday, when the U.S. said that it had struck a tentative deal with China to expand a ban on tariffs for products specified by the Information Technology Agreement (I.T.A.), which was initially struck in 1997 and now includes dozens of countries as signatories. Some of the top-selling technologies of 2014 didn’t even exist at the time; the new understanding between the U.S. and China would expand the ban to two hundred new categories, including new kinds of semiconductors, global-positioning systems, and medical devices. (The other I.T.A. countries must agree to the new deal before it can take effect.) China, though it is the largest exporter in the world, had resisted such a broad expansion—the country’s leaders worried about harming their small but growing semiconductor industry by eliminating those import tariffs, which are currently as high as twenty-five per cent.

Gary Hufbauer, an expert on U.S.–China trade relations and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, suggested to me that China wasn’t simply caving to U.S. demands; its leaders probably felt that the benefit of dropping tariffs, as part of a broader recent effort to liberalize trade, outweighed the potential impact on chip companies. “It’s probably in the long run good for China,” he said. “They’re probably at least partly sympathetic to the competition-makes-you-stronger argument.”

On Wednesday came a second milestone. Xi and Obama together pledged to start reducing carbon-dioxide emissions—sooner in the U.S. than in China, the argument being that China is still developing and needs to keep up its rapid pace of industrialization for a while longer—and to increase the share of renewable sources in both countries’ energy production. Among other steps, China would stop its emissions from growing starting in 2030, while the U.S. would, by 2025, cut its emissions by at least twenty-six per cent from 2005 levels. The accord is an important step, because China and the U.S. emit more greenhouse gases than any other country, and because this is China’s first public pledge to cap emissions.

Neither the tariff announcement nor the climate-change agreement is perfect. It’s one thing for two countries to make pledges and another to get the support needed to implement them—from other countries, in the case of tariffs, and from domestic politicians, in the case of climate change. (The latter, by all accounts, should be more difficult for the U.S. than the former.) Still, these were significant and concrete developments. How to explain all the coöperation, despite the strained relations? There are some obvious immediate reasons. China, as the host of the APEC summit, might have had an interest in lending substance to the event; Obama, disappointed by the midterms, must have equally welcomed a chance to tout some successes. Hufbauer told me that, beyond these factors, the relationship between the U.S. and China might be getting more nuanced, allowing for sharp disagreements in some arenas and collaboration in others. “I think the Chinese are better able to accept the idea which I talk about: ‘We are going to be geopolitical competitors—we have a lot of disagreements geopolitically—but we could also have economic cooperation,’ ” he said. “Now that’s a big idea, I think, for Americans to get their minds around.”